Life & Letters: Sweet Rod

Monday, April 26, 2010

Sweet Rod

A portion of a letter by Robert Murray M’Cheyne to W. C. Burns, a Scottish Presbyterian minister that went to China in 1848 as a missionary. He was recovering from sickness when M’Cheyne wrote this letter of thanks and encouragement. The letter was written June 10, 1840.

I am truly thankful that you have been raised up again—renewed, I trust, both in the inner and outer man. “I will cause you to pass under the rod, and I will bring you into the bond of the covenant” [Ezk. 20:37]. Sweet rod that drives the soul into such a precious resting place! “I will visit their iniquity with stripes; nevertheless, my loving–kindness I will not take from him” [Psa. 89:32-33]. This has been the experience of the greater part of my life, at least of my spiritual life. Remember Edwards’ magnificent resolution: “Resolved to improve afflictions to the uttermost.” Spread the sail when the breeze of adversity blows, and let it drive your vessel onwards on its course.

Robert Murray M’Cheyne: Memoir and Remains, Andrew A. Bonar, first published in 1884, reprinted by the Banner of Truth, 1966, p. 94.

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Why Life & Letters?

Before e-mails, telephones and text-messaging, people wrote letters to one another. Letters are personal and thoughtful. We can be thankful that biographers have letters to and from the people they write about from generations gone by, for modern forms of commu-nication leave us in want. Letters have a quality about them not found in e-mails. Historian and biographer, David McCullough, says, “I think often of how little we will leave about ourselves and our time in our own words. Maybe some of the e-mail will survive, but I doubt it. How will future gen-erations ever come to know us? Historians and biographers a hundred or three hundred years hence will have almost nothing of a personal kind to work with. Our story, consequently, will be a lot less interesting, less human, per-haps even impossible to write.”

It is a shame that few of us today craft letters to our children and friends. Letter writing is a lost art. I hope this blog will inspire others to write letters. Letters are valuable. C. H. Spurgeon said, “A man’s private letters often let you into the secrets of the heart.

Most of what appears here are selections taken from letters of Evangelical Christians. There will also be occasional reviews of books of letters.

Articulate, Thoughtful, and Well-Composed Letters

"In the nineteenth century, many biographers wrote books titled The Life and Letters of So-and-So. While this was not always an eloquent way of writing history, it speaks volumes about our cultural distance; if restricted to composing a narrative of someone’s life around his written correspondence today, we wouldn’t be able to write biographies, because people write too few letters to constitute the substance of a book. Further, if you read those nineteenth-century letters, you cannot fail to notice how articulate, thoughtful, and well composed they commonly are. A culture that was accustomed to thoughtful, well-composed letters produced remarkable significant letters, even among fairly common people. Today, we have become a culture of telephone babblers, unskilled at the most basic questions of composition…"

Why Johnny Can’t Preach: The Media Have Shaped the Messengers, by T. David Gordon, Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing, 2009, pp. 66-67.

A Wonderful Book of Letters: "The Marvelous Riches of Savoring Christ: The Letters of Ruth Bryan"

Monday, April 26, 2010

Sweet Rod

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Why Life & Letters?

Articulate, Thoughtful, and Well-Composed Letters

A Wonderful Book of Letters: "The Marvelous Riches of Savoring Christ: The Letters of Ruth Bryan"

A Sample Letter

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